Miu Miu's member club: isn't it a bit too cliché?

Miu Miu's member club: isn't it a bit too cliché?

Last week on Regent’s Street, Miu Miu – one of the brands I definitely love – was hosting an exclusive 3-day event. Men could join the event only if they were invited by women. You could discover and eventually buy the next collection.

The happy few could also listen to Alice Rawsthorn (design critic of the International Herald Tribune) or Penny Martin ( Editor in Chief of The Gentlewoman magazine) talking about female role models. They also had a chance to watch Women’s Tales (The Powder Room, directed by Zoe Cassavetes, Muta by Lucrecia Martel, The Woman Dress by Giada Colagrande, and It’s Getting Late by Massy Tadjedin).You can have a look on Miu Miu’s website. And read a summary of the event on Style Bubble.

There’s something annoying to my mind with this “club” approach.

I think that in order to tackle inequalities between women and men, we should all go beyond genre and what mother Nature gave us. Because if we keep on faking a commitment for women by excluding men, it would mean that the problem is men…or women.

It’s definitely wrong. Education is at stake, and it’s diffused by parents, school, institutions. In order to overpass the stereotypes and the constraints, we should establish targets, objectives, based on a common good. Enemy is culture, not people per se.

Affirmative action is cool but it’s just a tactic. And in this case, an exclusive club in which you could not go as a man (but that you could follow on Facebook Fan Page, we’re in a marketing world after all) is just a PR gimmick. People invited were people who would have been invited anyway. People who were speaking were people already well established, with ideas already well diffused in an inner circle. Nothing new. Nothing about subcultures, nothing about new sorts of men and women changing the world. Nothing about us.

L’entre soi is nice as a lobbying tool. But it should not be set up as the general rule for the general public. What’s happened in Regent’s Street remained there.